Bed of Nails

by Varenne, Antonin

  John shut his eyes, opened them again for half a second, shut them again, passed his hands over his face, then took a proper look.

  How often had he imagined this body as a corpse when Alan was still alive? When he had taken him into hospital, when he’d found him collapsed on his couch, in the last stages of overdosing and semi-comatose? How many times had he dragged him under a cold shower to make him vomit and come slowly back to life? The son of a bitch always allowed himself the luxury of a big smile when he returned to earth and found John leaning over him, beside himself with fear and anger. The smile that was the only thing between him and death.

  John could stare as long as he liked now, his knees giving way under him, but he would never see that smile again. It seemed impossible. Alan didn’t do dying, Alan always recovered at the last moment.

  Alan used to shave his head every day. It was a ritual of death, John had written somewhere, a habit from his army days. Now his hair was a millimetre long, dark and obscene on the retracted skin of the skull. Like a parasitical plant living on the dead. The inertia of life. Absurdly, John thought of his car freewheeling with the engine cut to the end of the road.

  Alan’s earrings and piercings had all been removed, leaving only their holes in the flesh. In his hollow cheeks, larger holes were visible, into which he used to insert kebab skewers for his act; around them ran deep and dry wrinkles. The mauve eyelids were closed over his huge eyes, now disproportionately large in the face which had shrunk like that of a mummy. The grey lips were clenched over the teeth, the nostrils looked pinched and the skin was crisscrossed with lines.

  He looked like nothing so much as a shrunken head of the Jivaro Indians, a skull with bulging eyes and Maori tattoos, as dead as old graffiti on a ruin.

  In John’s mind, the image of a little grey dried-up rodent gathering dust behind an old sofa imposed itself over the face of the corpse. Then his sight became blurred, and his eyes felt too dry from trying not to blink.

  Hirsh, after a quick glance at the body, had moved away to give Nichols time to compose himself. A uniformed policeman approached John sympathetically, holding a form in his outstretched arm. John nodded. The policeman ticked a box and handed him some papers. He signed the bottom of the page, and the official disappeared from the cold store.

  The white coat wanted to cover Alan up again, but John stopped him. He pulled back the sheet and uncovered the rest of the body.

  “Fucking hell!”

  The stretched skin either side of the two slashes across the chest hung loose like the flabby breasts of an old woman. The ribs were exposed. Alan had lost weight yet again. A deep cut on his right forearm bisected the tattoo of a double crescent. It had not had time to form a scar. His whole body was covered with unhealed punctures, both from his act and from his needles, mostly on his arms and feet. The tattoos were just on his face and arms. Alan had only used ink on the visible parts of his body. His retracted penis and testicles were black.

  John replaced the sheet and watched as the gurney slid back into the refrigerated compartment. Hirsh approached. Nichols was staring at the door of the locker as if he still needed to see, to be certain, and leave no room for any surrealist doubts. The embassy official put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Are you O.K.?”

  John moved his head slightly

  “Where did it happen?”

  “At the cabaret where Mr Mustgrave was performing: 6th arrondissement, a place called Le Caveau de la Bolée, if I remember rightly.”

  John had no doubt whatever that Hirsh’s recollection was perfectly accurate.

  “Did you sleep with Alan?”

  Hirsh withdrew his hand from John’s shoulder as if he had been scalded. John turned towards him, but Hirsh was looking at the entrance. Standing by the door, under strip-lighting that flattened his boxer’s face, leaving no shadows, the embassy driver was observing them. Hirsh left the room quickly and his chaperone followed him out. John stood for a moment before going back to the locker. He touched the stainless steel handle with his fingertips, then walked out himself.

  The light had changed, and despite the precocious spring, the late afternoon was quickly turning into evening. The driver was at the wheel. Hirsh stood alongside the open car door, his former aplomb in shreds. The young diplomat was clearly being watched, a shadow of scandal was probably hovering over his head. Alan, even when alive, was hardly the kind of person embassy staff should be hobnobbing with. Having died while suspended from hooks didn’t help. John wondered how they could ever have met.

  “Can we drop you off somewhere, Mr Nichols? Do you need a hotel room?”

  “When will Alan be sent back to the States?”

  “It’ll take a couple of days, no more. Would you like us to keep you informed?”

  “I’ll telephone. Just now I’m going to walk, I don’t need a lift.”

  As they approached the back of the car, Hirsh pushed in front of John, opened the tailgate and grabbed his bag before the driver, who was also moving quickly, could get there. The driver gave a kind of grunt, which Hirsh ignored, turning instead to look Nichols straight in the eye, with a particular kind of smile: a mixture of thanks, sympathy, fear and sadness. Plus a reply to John’s unanswered question.

  When he set out to seduce someone, Alan could be a monster. This diplomat had been there, and was still smarting from it. John replied to his pathetic grin with a short “Thanks.” Then he directed at the driver what he had been waiting for from the start: a ferocious look which the giant repaid in kind.

  John shook hands with Hirsh, the official’s film star looks now crestfallen, and watched the car with smoked windows slide away. When it had disappeared into the traffic, he opened his hand to read Hirsh’s card.

  5

  The night porter had opened the service entrance at half past eight. About twenty staff, waiting and chatting outside, had stubbed out their cigarettes and filed in silently. After greeting the janitor as he went off duty, they had headed for the cloakrooms, where men and women separated. Once they had their uniforms on, they had taken up position. Cash tills, security, information, cafeteria, cleaning and maintenance. By five to nine, everyone was ready and the lights went on. At nine, the glass doors were unlocked and the first visitors had been admitted. They had each received a ticket with a photograph of a creature – monkey, frog or bird – and passed through the revolving doors to the Great Gallery of the Natural History Museum, where they gasped as they looked up to the ceiling. Children began at once to shout and run about, with their parents chasing after them. By half past ten, about a hundred visitors were scattered throughout the different levels. By midday there were twice as many. By mid-afternoon, as well as its thousands of dead animals, the Great Gallery contained two hundred and forty-eight visitors, including three school parties. On the first floor, on a bridge, a group of seven-year-olds had stopped with their teachers and two parents acting as helpers. As they looked at the skeleton of a whale suspended on cables, the teacher was asking if anyone had heard of Moby-Dick. A little girl, her finger pointing up in the air, had interrupted him.

  “Please sir! What’s that man doing?”

  The whole class looked up.

  *

  Lambert parked the car in the rue Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, opposite the mosque, and close to the entrance of the Jardin des Plantes, the site of the Natural History Museum, with the Great Gallery of Evolution at its centre. He got out of the car and stretched. He was wearing a jacket in the colours of the French football team.

  “Brilliant! I’ve always wanted to see the museum!”

  Guérin was gazing sceptically at the obvious lump the Beretta 92 made under the tricolour jacket. Even Lambert was armed … He had always found it inappropriate that a man who found speaking quite a challenge should be carrying a weapon capable of firing off fifteen rounds in a few seconds. It was a totally absurd object, quite incompatible with the personality of his assistant. But the contradiction too was a logical
link in a logical chain. Under Guérin’s raincoat, nobody could see whether he was armed or not. He could have been carrying a heavy sub-machine gun.

  Guérin took the time to look at the street, hesitating in front of the mosque, assailed by an unpleasant impression, as the scent of mint tea stirred his memory. The anxiety that had engulfed his Moroccan trip returned with a blow to his solar plexus. A luminous flash of vertigo made him wince.

  Lambert, trotting along ahead of the boss, went in first, holding up his badge.

  A policeman from the quartier showed him the way.

  Impressed by the hall’s huge dimensions and the exhibits on show, grandiose and morbid, Guérin felt his legs twitching with a mixture of unease and excitement.

  Around the pool of blood a large crowd had gathered. Several men in suits – probably museum staff – four or five policemen, some paramedics, a perplexed-looking man – most likely a pathologist – and three firemen who were fixing ladders. Everyone was looking up, following the progress of two other firemen who were abseiling down from the upper levels. Between the two men on ropes, and the pool of blood, floated the skeleton of a whale. In its thoracic cavity, impaled on a rib the thickness of a telegraph pole, was the naked body of a man whose blood was still dripping. Shrill excited voices echoed round the gallery.

  A uniformed policeman greeted Guérin.

  “They’re going to try and get him down, lieutenant. But it’s not going to be easy and the curator – that gentleman over there,” he pointed to a suit, “keeps going on that we’ve got to mind out for the skeleton and not damage it.”

  “Any witnesses?”

  “About thirty school kids, lieutenant, and three teachers, plus a dozen other visitors. They all saw him take his clothes off and jump from the balcony on the fourth level.”

  “Is that the racket I can hear?”

  “They’re in the café on the second floor, people are trying to calm them down. The cashier is asking for receipts for all the drinks and ice creams.”

  Lambert had joined the group standing under the skeleton, fascinated by the bloodstain which functioned in the opposite way from the one in the office. Guérin had lost interest in the firemen and the technical problems. He left the scene and went up to the first floor, where he walked through a procession of giraffes, buffalo, gazelles, lions and other animals who seemed to be fleeing from a forest fire. Stopping in the middle of the large platform, he breathed in the atmosphere. Amazed and on edge, he murmured to himself:

  “Weirder and weirder.”

  With small, quick steps, he walked round the rim of the gallery looking for the best vantage point to view the whale. He passed a glass case of birds and winced as he noticed a couple of stuffed parrots, much older, but actually in better condition than Churchill. The idea that they could live in couples depressed him for a moment as he thought sadly of Churchill, a bitter fifty-year-old bachelor, alone on his perch. But the image was quickly swept away by the pregnant intuition which had taken hold of him as soon as he had entered the Great Gallery. A final leap, in full view of the public and of dozens of extinct or endangered species! What a way to go!

  As he was on his way up to the third level, he heard a shout: “Look out!” Then the thud of something soft hitting the ground, followed by a metallic clang, probably the ladder falling over. On the balcony of the third level, he found what he was looking for, the ideal vantage point. From here he could see all over the gallery, with a perfect view of the fourth-floor balcony, and down to the skeleton hanging below him. He went to the guard rail, looked searchingly at the wooden banister, then leaned over, taking care not to touch it: a pitiless sheer drop.

  Under the whale, confusion was apparent. The rib had finally given way, to the audible despair of the curator, and the dead man had ended up reunited with his blood along with a piece of whalebone two metres long. The pathologist was standing with his arms crossed and his head bowed, while the firemen were at a loss.

  Guérin ran back down towards the café. He went up to a policeman who seemed completely out of his depth, surrounded as he was by hysterical children who had started jabbering even more wildly on seeing the corpse fall to the floor.

  “Lieutenant Guérin from Police H.Q. I want you to cordon off the whole of the balcony from the third level up.”

  He pointed it out to the uniform, who was laden with sandwiches.

  “Just close all this off, and I’ll send you a lab team. I want the fingerprints from ten metres of the banister, either side of the column, see what I mean?”

  He was still pointing his finger at the place. “Understand?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Are there C.C.T.V. cameras here?”

  “I don’t know sir, we’ll have to ask the museum security people.”

  “Get working on that balcony right away.”

  The policeman put down the sandwiches, radioed his colleagues and hurried off, only too glad to get away from the schoolchildren.

  The security officer whom he ran to earth at the information desk, holding animated discussions with the staff, told him that no, there weren’t any cameras inside the museum, only at the entrance.

  Ten minutes later, Guérin was coming out of the video room, a hard disk under his arm and in a high state of excitement. His big eyes darted here and there looking for a fixed point.

  “Where’s Lambert?”

  The policeman the question was addressed to took a step backwards.

  “Who?”

  “My deputy. Fair hair, football jacket, mouth hanging open.”

  “Oh right, him. He went over there.”

  Guérin found Lambert in a corner of the ground floor admiring a badly lit creature: a small member of the whale family about three metres in length with a long twisted horn sticking out of its forehead.

  “Boss, did you know a thing like this existed? A … what’s it say …? Narwhal?”

  “They won’t exist much longer. Come on Lambert, we’ve got work to do.”

  “It says here it’s a tooth. But what use would it be?”

  “That’s why they’re dying out: it’s like you, Lambert. Get a move on, we’re going.”

  Lambert hurried along behind the boss as they walked out.

  In the car, driving with one hand and scratching his fair curls with the other, he went on.

  “Yeah, but really, what use is that, a tooth in the middle of your forehead? Awesome, though! If I could choose, I’d spike myself on a narwhal tooth, not a cachalot.”

  Guérin paid no attention to his deputy’s ramblings. He was looking, as if it were the Holy Grail, at the little box full of ones and zeros sitting on his knees, as if he feared to lose a single drop of Christ’s blood. He was ecstatic, on the point of shouting with joy, tapping his head as if sending a message in code.

  “Don’t you agree, boss?”

  “What?”

  “I said they’d do well to keep quiet about this, the museum people. Because a place like that, once it gets around, everyone will want to come there to do themselves in. What about the report, boss? We didn’t speak to the pathologist, we don’t know the suicide’s I.D., nothing.”

  It was getting dark now, and Lambert was quite right. Suicides went in waves of fashion even if it meant breaking their own rules. Rebellion by suicide!

  Guérin took out his notebook and started to scribble furiously.

  Lambert failed to follow up his intuition, which was just a passing thought, and went on to something else.

  “The brigadier-chef in the 6th arrondissement, remember him, Roger, he’s called? The one who had to deal with the man who jumped in the river at New Year? He was there just now. He remembered me, he said he got his death of cold after going in the water that time. And he said this guy, well a witness told him, anyway, this guy shouted something when he jumped.”

  Guérin was covering his notebook with signs Lambert could make neither head nor tail of, shorthand presumably, arrows, circles, little men and d
eath’s heads. Lambert turned at the lights and said gently.

  “Boss, are you O.K.?”

  “What did you say?”

  Guérin, hallucinating, was scratching the skin on his bald head until the blood started to run down his cheek.

  “Nothing …” Lambert’s voice died away, “Just that the guy shouted ‘Thanks!’ when he jumped.”

  “To the office, young Lambert. To the office.”

  “Boss, stop it.”

  Lambert had never been able to find any scientific words for what went on inside Guérin’s head. When a crisis struck, he just put it to himself in his own way: the boss’s brain was boiling over. He never mentioned this to anyone else, although he would have liked to understand, in order to feel reassured. But better not to let anyone else hear about his boss’s funny turns. Of that he had no doubt at all. The only way he would settle down, as Lambert well knew, was to follow his own logic until the carriages got back on the track again. Hoping that the boss would find his way home. He speeded up. Their car had no siren, so he just lowered the sun visor, which had a black-and-white sign reading Police.

  He parked in front of the little side entrance to No. 36, praying that the encroaching night would be dark enough to cover their arrival. He glanced along the quai des Orfèvres in the dusk. Nobody. Guérin was already getting out of the car, clutching his hard disk. He had stopped mutilating himself but was still very hyper. Stifling a curse, Lambert reached into the glove compartment and grabbed a woolly bundle. Then he followed the boss, who was wandering about in the middle of the road. In his yellow raincoat, he reminded Lambert of that musical comedy with people dancing in the rain. Except that when Guérin went loco, he – Lambert – was the umbrella protecting him from the showers of shit. As further precaution, he jammed the crumpled wool cap advertising Berettas on Guérin’s head.

  “Where are we, Lambert? What are you doing?”

  “Nothing, boss, nothing, er, let’s go and look at the videos. We’ll go up the side stairs.”